This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
(Below is the reprinted original text)
This Is the Highest Realm of Education; I Was Deeply Moved After Reading It!
An American teacher told this story at a medical college in China:
On a morning after a storm, a man was walking along the seashore and noticed that in the shallow pools on the beach there were many small fish that had been washed ashore by the previous night’s storm. Although the trapped fish were close to the sea, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of them, before long the water in the shallow pools would be absorbed by the sand and evaporated by the sun, and the little fish would dry up and die.
The man suddenly noticed a little boy on the beach who kept picking up little fish from the shallow pools and throwing them back into the sea. The man couldn’t help walking over: “Child, there are hundreds and thousands of little fish in these pools. You can’t save them all.”
“I know,” the little boy answered without looking back.
“Oh? Then why are you still throwing them? Who cares?”
“This little fish cares!” the boy answered, picking up a fish and throwing it back into the sea.
In fact, this story corresponds exactly to a saying of the old Tagore: “The aim of education should be to convey the breath of life to people.” Therefore the “nurturing” in education should begin with respect for life, turning human nature toward goodness, broadening people’s minds and awakening the beautiful “roots of goodness” within them; that is, letting students have the beautiful state of mind of “this fish cares.”
A survivor of a Nazi concentration camp became the principal of an American secondary school. Whenever a new teacher came to the school, he would give the teacher a letter, which read: “Dear Teacher, I have seen with my own eyes what no human being should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers; children poisoned by educated physicians; infants killed by trained nurses. Seeing all this, I am suspicious of education. My request is: help your students become human. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.”
Clearly, human beings have a bestial side and an angelic side. The aim of the educator is to temper people’s souls, so that they overcome the bestial and turn toward the angelic side.
Education is the education of the human soul, not a mere accumulation of rational knowledge and cognition. This is the enduring and grand ultimate purpose of education. Otherwise, the more knowledge you have, the greater the harm to humanity and to life.
The lessons in this regard are all too painful: Lu Gang, an outstanding student of Dr. T. D. Lee, failed to win a dissertation award; consumed by jealousy and disappointment, he shot dead four space physicists and then killed the classmate who had won the award. In Xuanhua, Henan, a 16-year-old boy surnamed Liu, after quarrelling with his girlfriend, insanely drove a car into pedestrians all along the road, leaving 2 dead and 13 injured.
Nowadays our school education often neglects the formation of students’ basic character, basic morality and basic emotions, so that some students become more and more indifferent, apathetic and even cruel toward life and the affairs of the world.
So a Japanese educator once said that we should cultivate in students “the sentiment of a heart that leaps at the sight of a clump of wild chrysanthemums.” This sentiment is the sentiment possessed by the boy who cared about the life of every little fish on the beach. Otherwise, if one regards little fish as worthless as grass and tramples fresh flowers, even if one’s moral score may be very high, one has lost the value of human life.
Respect for people and reverence for the universe are, most fundamentally, respect for the existence of life and awareness that life cannot be repeated. People should not take life without cause, even very lowly life. When a person has no compassion at all for lowly creatures or animals, can you expect him to respect higher life? Conversely, when a person is full of care for the life of a blade of grass or a little fish, how could he not respect higher life, human life?
The ancients said: “There is no greater sorrow than the death of the heart.” A person who is cold and indifferent to the outside world is a person without hope; a nation made up of many people unmoved by life and by living beings is a nation without hope.
As educators, we may have many concrete tasks to do and many concrete lessons to attend to, but in cultivating students’ good moral qualities and humanistic sentiments, the most basic, most fundamental and most important thing is to awaken in students the conscience that respects life.
